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U.S. Explores Protection Of Airliners From Missiles

With two recent attacks on big airplanes leaving Baghdad International Airport, experts on civilian aviation are debating how civilian airliners outside the battle zones could be protected from shoulder-fired missiles.

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to announce soon that it has selected two or three teams of bidders to explore how to put military-style antimissile technology on airliners. But airline experts have been questioning whether on-board systems are adequate. After an attack on an Air Force C-17 as it flew out of Baghdad on Dec. 9, those questions have increased.

The Air Force said that one engine on the four-engine C-17 exploded because of ''hostile action,'' but has not confirmed that it was a missile. The plane returned to the airport.

It was the first combat-related damage to a C-17, the Air Force said. The incident raised questions with civilian experts because the C-17, built by Boeing, is one of the younger planes in the Air Force inventory, and would presumably have been equipped with a system that detects missiles and then either drops decoy flares or deploys a laser to blind incoming missiles, the two technologies in broad use.

''If a C-17 so equipped was hit, it's some bad news for the civil world,'' said Langhorne M. Bond, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration from 1977 to 1981. But Mr. Bond said that it might not have had any antimissile defenses.

An Air Force spokesman said that for ''operational reasons,'' he would not say what equipment the C-17 carried. Civilian experts say that over the years, the Air Force has put a variety of systems on those planes. In addition, they said, some are so prone to false alarms that pilots have been known to turn them off.

A few days before the C-17 was hit, a civilian wide-body jet was hit by a missile. On Nov. 22, a DHL cargo plane was hit on departure, a vulnerable time because the engines are working near maximum thrust, and emitting an easy-to-spot heat trail. It did not have an antimissile system.

The DHL plane was an Airbus A-300, a type in common use for carrying passengers. It, too, successfully returned to the airport, although aviation experts said it had a narrow escape. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, the missile destroyed the plane's hydraulic systems, and the crew could maneuver the plane only by independently varying the speed of its two engines.

In response to the missile threat, in September the Department of Homeland Security asked contractors for proposals to equip civilian planes with military antimissile technologies. Twenty-four responded, and the department invited five of them to present their technologies.

Of the five, two or three are expected to get contracts early next month for $2 million each, to work on their proposals for six months. Then the department would select some number of those three for another $45 million contract for development of prototypes and testing, industry participants said.

The whole program would take 18 to 24 months. Michelle Petrovich, a spokeswoman for the department, said that at the end of the period, the department would decide whether to deploy the technology, invest in new research and development or take some other path.

For example, the Avisys Corporation, of Austin, Tex., which says it has installed antimissile technology on aircraft that carry foreign heads of state, and Arinc, of Annapolis, Md., which specializes in various kinds of aviation-related electronics, have proposed a system that will use two kinds of sensors, to cut down on the false-alarm rate. One is a system that looks for light in the ultraviolet spectrum that is emitted by a missile's plume. The other is doppler radar that calculates the speed of an incoming missile, as well as its direction. The idea is to eliminate false alarms, according to the designers.

The system releases flares that burn on contact with air. But the flares burn at a relatively low temperature, so they are nearly invisible from the ground, so opponents with missiles would not know they were in use, said Ronald A. Gates, president of Avisys. Proponents say the system would sell for about $500,000 per airplane and would be easy to maintain, because not much can go wrong with the flares.

Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors, of Akron, Ohio, is one of three groups of companies to propose a system that uses an onboard laser. Cary Dell, a spokesman for the company, said that with a laser, ''it's always available and there's nothing to replenish.'' If a plane relies on expendable flares, Mr. Dell said, ''there's a limit to the load of expendables you can put into a system.''

Lockheed Martin's system was developed over the last two years at the Air Force's White Sands test range in New Mexico, and is not yet on any planes, Mr. Dell said. It would meet the government's goals for price and weight of $1 million per plane and no more than 1,000 pounds, he said.

But the airlines remain unenthusiastic. ''There have been no tests to show that this technology can be transferred from military jets to commercial airliners,'' said Douglas Wills, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the trade group of the major airlines.

Most military planes can evade missiles because they can maneuver like high-performance sports cars, Mr. Wills said. In contrast, he said, a commercial jet ''is like the Greyhound bus of the sky.''

Mr. Wills said that there was no single solution, but that the government should be offering bounties for shoulder-fired missiles, to dry up the black market. And the government should be securing the areas around airports, he said.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2003, on Page A00028 of the National edition with the headline: U.S. Explores Protection Of Airliners From Missiles. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe